I feel really uncomfortable looking at your pics, though I did look. I keep thinking how I'd feel if I saw someone taking photos of me in that state. It just feels terrible. I know that's not your intention and maybe its just me.

I have no problem with the photos. It's not as if there was a baying crowd shouting at him to jump ( which it appears he didn't anyway).
There was an excellent documentary, I think on Channel4, last year about a year of suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge which identified the people and also interviewed the friends and family left behind which gave a real insight in to the affect on them.
And we did see footage of people jumping from the Twin Towers.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
And journalists only follow recommendations when it suits them.

I agree the photos are innocuous - it's not as though wjfox was happily snapping away while someone killed himself - the reverse - he did the right thing and called the police. And from the photos he seems to have been fairly far away. Main thing is, the police got there and apparently talked the guy out of it. Top marks wjfox.

Back in 1983, as a teenage art lover on my way to the Hayward, I nearly walked into a clearly "mentally disturbed" man pacing around David Mach's Polaris sculpture on the South Bank walkways - a submarine made of used car tyres.

I hurriedly "passed by on the other side".

A few hours later he suffered fatal burns after he set the sculpture ablaze wuth some sort of accelerant.

Although this tragic event has generally been regarded as arson - a horribly misjudged form of art criticism/political protest, I continue to wonder whether there was a suicidal element.